Lance Glinn:

Welcome into another episode of the Inside the ICE House podcast. Today's guest is Paul Beswick. He is the Chief Information and Operations Officer for Marsh. Paul, thanks so much for joining us Inside the ICE House.

Paul Beswick:

Thank you, Lance. It's great to be here.

Lance Glinn:

So Paul, as we sit here in January, this is a major moment for Marsh, the shift to a single brand after years under the Marsh McLennan name. Take us first behind the decision. From your perspective, what were really the key factors that made this the right time to have this brand transformation?

Paul Beswick:

Thanks, Lance. Well, we're a 150-year-old firm, and there's a huge amount of legacy that's in all of the brands that we've been going to market under over the last number of years. And one of the challenges, of course, is making sure that when we're working with our clients, we're really bringing the best of everything that we can do. And while we do extraordinary work in every one of those companies individually, some of the most ambitious and exciting things we do are the things where we're bringing the ability to collaborate across all of those capabilities together to do things that are even more impactful.

And it's confusing when people are working with four different companies, and it means that it's harder to sell that overall joint message and really bring it all together. So this is a signal that that's going to be a bigger part of what we're doing going forward, that we want to make sure that this feels like an integrated set of offerings, even while a lot of the work we do will sit in one or other of the lines of business that we have today. But it's a sign that that's our aspiration to bring more of that to clients in a more ambitious and systematic way.

Lance Glinn:

So traditionally, when people hear the name Marsh, they thought of risk advisory and insurance broking. With this rebrand, as you mentioned in your last answer, Marsh now encompasses everything, right? Guy Carpenter, Mercer, Oliver Wyman, everything that these companies have to offer, along with obviously and soon to be changing to those units of the brand as well. How does this transformation reflect the overall leadership team's vision for the company's future and for where you ultimately want Marsh to get to?

Paul Beswick:

Well, this is the starting line, I guess, rather than the finishing line. It's a milestone, but it's a milestone that marks the beginning of a lot of hard work. Because as you say, the Marsh brand at the moment has the association with insurance broking and risk advisory. And we are now starting the journey of moving that association with our clients, with the market, and with stakeholders that we work with all around the world to make it mean more than that, to make it become something that is the sum of the parts.

That's a deliberate process. It's going to take us a year or two to run through. And I think that reflects where the EC is. We recognize there's a big opportunity to go after, but we also need to honor the legacy of those brands. We need to make sure we don't confuse people along the way and that the meaning of the Marsh brand is something that is evolving, is changing, and it's going to become something much bigger than it is today.

Lance Glinn:

And this transition, as you said, will unfold over a number of years, right? This is only the beginning of an important beginning, important milestone you said, but only the beginning, not the end. Full adoption expected by 2027. So for... In 2027, excuse me. So for a company with more than a century of history, 150 years plus, a transformation of this scale is never simple. There could come challenges along the way. What do you anticipate? What are those challenges that you and the team led by John Doyle might expect over the course of the next few years? And how are you preparing to really navigate those potential hurdles to make sure that everything stays convenient, everything stays easy for all stakeholders involved, whether they're employees, shareholders, clients, so be it.

Paul Beswick:

Yeah. Let me take a few of those different stakeholders. So from a client perspective, many of our clients know us primarily under one of those brands, and it may not be the Marsh brand. And the strength of those brands is different with different stakeholders. It's different in different parts of the world. And so in some places, Mercer's probably our strongest brand in other places, Marsh is and in other places, maybe Oliver Wyman is. So helping people understand that transition is going to therefore look quite different in different sectors. There is somewhere it'll be straightforward and people already see us turning up together. And in others, we're really moving from one brand to another. So you can imagine it as some is an extension of a brand they know. In some places, it's almost a new brand that they don't necessarily know. So that's certainly a big factor on the client side.

Internally, this sort of thing is obviously a signal to people internally to look up and out at the things that we do around the business as a whole, and that that is a more important part of the future that we're building together. That's always a journey, but I think it's one that people are excited about because it really does let us break out of the sets of things that we know how to do today and helps us look for more ambitious programs that can create more value. But there's a lot of detail behind the scenes as one of my responsibilities is our technology, rebranding people's email addresses and changing all of our apps and what logo you see when you go into Okta and log in.

Lance Glinn:

Things a lot of people don't necessarily think of...

Paul Beswick:

Absolutely.

Lance Glinn:

... when they think about this type of stuff.

Paul Beswick:

Yeah. But making this real, it requires all of this stuff to run through systematically so you're not leaving yourself in a sort of halfway house. And it feels like this real commitment behind this as a meaningful step. It's not half-hearted and it is something that pervades everything that we do.

Lance Glinn:

No, that's a good point. Like I said, not a lot of things people think of, but that are really crucial to a rebrand. Like you mentioned changing emails, you mentioned an application, right? Last thing you want to do is to change a name and then go to an app or go to a website or go to wherever and still have the old name there. And that just causes confusion. And obviously that's not something that anyone, regardless of the type of stakeholder you are, wants with the business that they're interacting with.

Paul Beswick:

Especially because I think people have had it hammered into them from a cyber risk perspective that you want to watch out for these sorts of mismatches. So if we're making them appear in front of our clients, we don't want them worried that what we're serving up to them is a risk of any kind.

Lance Glinn:

Absolutely. So the rebrand also introduced the new business and client services unit, which will fall under your leadership. What's the vision behind creating this unit and how will it really strengthen or even expand what Marsh is able to deliver going forward?

Paul Beswick:

Yeah. So business and client services brings together our global technology teams and our global operations teams. Now, the technology journey is one that's been long underway. I started the integration of those teams about five years ago. Adding in the operations teams is what's new within the BCS model. And the aim is simple. We want to build scale and efficiency where we can, and it makes sense to do so, but we don't want to lose the relevance, the focus on the market, the support of our different lines of business in the places where that's important. And we do a huge number of different things. And so the work that happens across that team is actually pretty varied, but there are opportunities to learn more effectively together.

A lot of the challenges that different parts of our organization face have a lot of commonality. The challenge of how we integrate AI into all the work we do is something that is absolutely common across everything. And there are opportunities to build some supporting services that have more scale, allow us to be more efficient, and then plow that back into investing in the front line of our business and our growth engine. So BCS's goal is to support our businesses as effectively as possible, as cost-effectively as possible, and then put them in a position to grow more effectively as well.

Lance Glinn:

So you mentioned a couple words there in your answer, excellence, operational excellence, efficiency as well as some of the sort of mandates for the business and client services unit. How do you ensure that the improvements your team drives translate into reinvestment in client value and long-term growth? And how do you really define operational excellence within the context of this team?

Paul Beswick:

So I think the reality is executing on that is the sum of a lot of little things. And all of it is in the goal of some level better, faster, cheaper. Let's keep it simple. Almost every process that we run, especially as technology marches forward and gives us new opportunities, there's some room to look at a different way of doing it that can turn stuff around, provide better support, and can do so in a more cost-effective way so that we can grow with the capacity that we have without needing to expand it as much as we otherwise would.

If we can make that work effectively, which we have done on the technology side, we're really running that same playbook again. It will free the capacity that lets us invest in the frontline fairly automatically. And I'm sure we'll talk about AI later, but that is a powerful new tool to move the automation frontier and to challenge a lot of how that work is done and can be done faster and in a more cost-effective way.

Lance Glinn:

Well, Paul, why wait? Let's talk about AI right now. And look, I think what you're doing, what Marsh is doing as a whole is innovating. They're innovating the brand and really AI has been the biggest innovation in quite some time. I think it was previous guests who said you had what the internet did to Yellow Pages, or excuse me, what the cell phone did to Yellow Pages, you can compare what Uber and Lyft did to taxi cabs, and you have now what AI is doing to the internet and everything that we know in our daily lives.

And for some, this AI, artificial intelligence is just a buzzword, an easy buzzword to sort of throw around. But for others, it really is revolutionizing their business, what they do on a regular basis, both from the backend that is more employee only, internal, but also on the front end that is more client facing as well. How would you describe Marsh's AI journey?

Paul Beswick:

So I would describe it as, firstly, fundamental to what I'm trying to do. A big chunk of the rationale for why BCS, why now, is that at this point in time, the closeness of our operational work and our technology capabilities is more critical even than it usually is. We started on the generative AI, and I want to separate AI generally and generative AI because they are in many ways complimentary tools. We started that 2023.

By summer '23, we'd rolled out a productivity tool to the entire company, and that's been a really strong foundation to build understanding, familiarity, to get people across the organization to integrate it into how they work, and then use that to go after the more monetizable use cases and drive the automation journey. So it's hugely important in the way that we're seeing the evolution of the productivity of the company evolve, but there are lots of different stages to it. There's an employee productivity stage, which is very valuable, really important as a foundation, but quite hard to capture the value from. There's an automation phase mostly in back office, which has real money associated with it and where we're seeing a huge amount of potential. And then perhaps most excitingly, there's a client facing side where the ability to take the knowledge, the data, the perspectives that we have as a company and bring those to clients in a much more accessible way is actually quite transformative in terms of the kinds of advice and products that we can create.

Lance Glinn:

And so when you think about AI at Marsh and all that you and your team and really the whole company is going through and integrating it beginning in 2023 or integrating GenAI beginning in 2023, and then as the technology sort of evolves, what would you say are the biggest priorities or the biggest goals in Marsh's AI integration? What is it that you're most focused on achieving through bringing in, whether it be generative AI or just AI as a whole?

Paul Beswick:

So I think the first thing I would say is we want to make all of our colleagues a little bit better every day through the tools that we put in their hands. And technology is this incredibly empowering thing. In a lot of organizations, access to technology is quite strictly gated and it has to be for risk management purposes and so on and so forth.

Lance Glinn:

There are cybersecurity reasons for why it has to be gated.

Paul Beswick:

Absolutely. But when AI is set up correctly, it's something you can put in everyone's hands and you can give them a lot of power. And especially as you build out that ecosystem, if you're clever about how you construct it and you build the controls into it, it's actually quite a democratizing force for the use of technology across the firm. It's actually really exciting to see how much creativity you can unlock across an organization just by putting some of those sorts of tools into their hands. So that's sort of my foundational piece. I think the second is, and this is very directly part of the BCS journey, the journey within BCS is to unlock the ability to invest in growth.

One of the ways we'll do that is we will look to streamline, automate, simplify. That's a very long-term journey. This is an entirely new orthogonal set of tools to bring into that problem. And for us, because so much of what we do is based around documents and words and data, it's actually incredibly useful as a technology because it's able to process things that technology couldn't really process before and let us move the frontier of what's automatable in a fairly fundamental way. So a lot of data ingestion type work, a lot of content generation type work as you might expect, but really deeply embedded in our operational processes and the way that we drive value. So that's a lot of where I spend my time.

I mentioned the unlocking of our data and perspectives to clients, but actually there are a couple of other things that I'm perhaps more excited about, which are more widescale enabling capabilities across the organization as a whole. One is about access to data and the ease with which our internal data is accessible to our own people. I can't quite figure out if I made this phrase up or I picked it up somewhere, so I'm definitely not going to claim credit as my invention, but conversational business intelligence. The idea that let's get away from data warehouses and dashboards. What you really want is the ability to ask a question and have the answer come back to you. And I want my agents to go off and find the data sets and consolidate them for me and bring the analysis back without that being what it is in so many organizations today, which is a chain of people emailing each other.

Lance Glinn:

I mean, ultimately you want simplicity over complexity.

Paul Beswick:

Absolutely. Simple question. It might be complex how we get there, simple answer. And the ability to drive that sort of capability. And then the second thing, which I think is a really interesting opportunity is unlocking all the latent knowledge within an organization. All the stuff that's in people's heads, but is fundamentally unsearchable today are the ways to capture that information and make it something that's part of the organization's hive mind, if you like, so that again, all the friction associated with navigating an organization can be dramatically reduced. I think AI can help with those things very meaningfully and very much in the short term.

Lance Glinn:

So a previous guest on the podcast noted something that I thought was really eye-opening where he said, AI is the worst it will ever be right now because it will only get better. It'll only get faster. More use cases will come about on a daily basis, weekly basis, monthly, yearly, et cetera. So as the technology evolves and as new use cases emerge, how does Marsh plan to keep innovating alongside the technology and really stay ahead of what is a really accelerating curve?

Paul Beswick:

Yeah. Well, we have a strong innovation center that has been behind the buildup of our tools in this space. Most of what we've created, we've built ourselves. We leverage other people's models and other services where it makes sense to do so. But that's meant that we have a very deep understanding as to how this stuff actually works in practice, not just how the AI bit works, but actually what is arguably the harder bit. How does that connect into your data securely? How do you create something that operates at massive scale effectively, stays resilient? How do you deploy agents in a way that they're not just individual standalone things that solve one job, that they become part of a network that creates new value.

As you start moving from handfuls to dozens to hundreds to thousands, how do you actually organize them so they work together, kind of like an organization works together? So having that capability internally, constantly pushing at the boundaries of what's possible has helped us keep in touch with things. And as a result, we've rebuilt our tools probably three times over almost from scratch because the technology has caught up to things we were doing ourselves where a standard emerged.

So I don't want to get too technical, but if you take tool calling, something that really extends the ability of an agent, we've built our own tool calling framework, and then I think Google, maybe or Anthropic came out with MCP as a standard, so we've picked that up, didn't make sense to keep trying to maintain our own, but we had to build it because we needed it before there was a standard. And there are quite a lot of places where that sort of process is playing through.

Lance Glinn:

And introducing AI into an organization isn't just about the technology aspect of it. I think it's really about the people using it and making sure that it benefits them and not burdens them. How is Marsh approaching the challenge of really upskilling or re-skilling employees so that, again, like I said, they use this AI to the betterment of the work that they do rather than have it hinder the work that they do?

Paul Beswick:

Yeah, I think there's a lot of fear for people generally around AI. And I think for the most part, it's something we've avoided as a big issue. Part of our ability to do that was when we introduced this, firstly, it was early. Secondly, everyone was very excited by the technology at the time. And thirdly, we were doing it so cheaply that there was no need to bring it in linked to some kind of cost savings program. At the time, it was costing us, I don't know, a few thousand dollars in API calls, and the first version of this tool took literally a day and a half to create. So at that point, you don't need a business case. What you have is something that's cool, people are excited about, and people can use and get value from, that you're giving to them essentially as a gift.

And actually, one of the things that is kind of unique in my career, I think it's fairly unique in technology as an opportunity, is that you can do that. And the business case is at some level so obvious that if you can keep it cheap enough, it doesn't have to come in with an implied threat. It can come in as something that is an opportunity to discover, to experiment, to play-

Lance Glinn:

As a tool, essentially.

Paul Beswick:

Yeah, to find out what works for you. And then from that, we're learning about the places where we have more systematic programs. The other thing we did was we have a stuffed toy avatar of our tool, which is a hot commodity.

Lance Glinn:

Okay. Does it have a name?

Paul Beswick:

Len AI.

Lance Glinn:

Len AI.

Paul Beswick:

Yeah. Honoring the McLennan that we're dropping from-

Lance Glinn:

Sure. Is it like an animal?

Paul Beswick:

I should have brought one in.

Lance Glinn:

Yeah.

Paul Beswick:

It's a sort of square kind of TV and antenna thing with long dangly legs.

Lance Glinn:

Nice.

Paul Beswick:

And we dress it up for various holidays.

Lance Glinn:

There you go. Have fun.

Paul Beswick:

So we've got Len AI in a Santa hat.

Lance Glinn:

It's always important to have fun with it, right? Those types of things, we're all in business, right? And obviously businesses have goals and they have numbers they want to hit and they have things they need to do, but you always have to have fun in some way, shape or form. And that's something you have fun with.

And so we talk about AI and its constant evolution and it's constantly transforming and new use cases are being shown on a daily basis and introduced. And leadership today means I think guiding teams through constant change and uncertainty. And obviously we just talked about how much AI is changing and how uncertain its future may be. What's your approach to leading through this ambiguity and really helping your team stay focused and confident when the future with AI and technology as a whole may be a little uncertain?

Paul Beswick:

Yeah. I think there are probably a few aspects to that. So firstly, I try to make sure the team hears from me a lot. One of the things that I've done, it actually came about by accident during COVID. Every Friday pretty much for what is now six years, I've hosted a half hour hangout every Friday morning where it's me and a guest having a chat about whatever. It's an open invite to anyone on the team. A few hundred people usually turn up.

Lance Glinn:

An internal guest or someone external?

Paul Beswick:

Usually internal.

Lance Glinn:

Internal.

Paul Beswick:

It's a great way for people to get to know different parts of the organization and what we do. And it's also a great opportunity for me to talk about the sorts of things that are going on and the pressures of people under and help with that. I found that helpful. The other thing is I like to pressure test the things that we do. I like to show that I'm in the details. One of the things on the technology side in particular is this is changing how code is written in fairly fundamental ways. I'm spending time writing code every now and then. I always have a few side projects going on and I'm pressure testing the delivery platforms that we have to make sure they can move at the speed that the code writing can. The developers know that I'm doing this. And I think this has really helped them understand how important they're going to be as part of the journey.

And I think the third piece is just helping people raise their eyes to think about what is out there, to make sure that's not something that's seen as the preserve of senior management to dream about long-term visions, but it's something that every part of the organization has a part to play because every part of any organization has opportunities to be better, has opportunities to challenge themselves and to challenge the assumptions that fit around them that constrain how they can operate. So I try to drive that culture through the organization as much as I can.

Lance Glinn:

So we began our conversation talking about Marsh's rebrand, a major transformation for the company. So as we start to wrap up our conversation and as you and the leadership team chart the near term future under John Doyle's direction, what does the immediate next chapter look like for Marsh moving forward?

Paul Beswick:

So as I mentioned earlier, the job one at the moment is to make sure that we work with our clients through this brand transition. We keep everything that is great about the businesses that we have. We transfer that brand equity, and then we build on it and we show how Marsh can be more than what may be in their heads right now about what Marsh is. That's a huge priority.

We're always on this journey of looking for ways that we can be more efficient and plow that back into the evolution of our client facing offering, the effectiveness of which we serve our clients, the products that we build and the innovation we can bring to them. That never goes away. And we want to make sure that that's really part of making the new Marsh as meaningful as it can be.

Lance Glinn:

And so as you look further ahead and the leadership team and John look further ahead, how are you defining and measuring success through the rest of 2026, but also beyond in '27, '28, '29 and moving forward?

Paul Beswick:

I think we always want to see ourselves outgrowing the market. We want to see us being the preference of our clients and having them really see both what we do today and Marsh more holistically as a fundamental part of the strategic advice that they rely on. We want to hear them saying when their biggest problems come along, "What does Marsh think about this?" And be able to bring all of the types of expertise that we have to bear to be able to answer those sorts of questions. And we want to keep driving our revenue and earnings momentum by constantly turning the handle on operating the company as effectively as we can.

Lance Glinn:

Well, Paul, I appreciate you joining me for this conversation. Thank you so much for joining us Inside The ICE House.

Paul Beswick:

Thank you. It's been a pleasure to be here.